Elisha Daemon

by E. C. Ambrose

  She bobbed again and went about her labor as the master summoned his students back from the bed. “Good diagnosis. We did not even need to go on to urine or astrology, did we? No. I suggest you be careful about washing up for dinner.” The students glanced at their own hands and the student who had spoken the diagnosis lost his smug expression, but the teacher went on, “What treatments exist for leprosy, aside from prayer and the abjuration of whatever sinful behavior has brought it on?”

  “Castration,” blurted Bastien, then reddened as the others snickered.

  The teacher smiled through his beard. “Perhaps not in this case. Others?”

  “Pliny suggested snake’s venom.”

  “Snake’s venom! Something to try. What else?”

  “Paracelsus tells us that lamb’s blood might be efficacious.”

  “The blood of the lamb, very significant. Anything else? What about scouring the lesions? Some physicians have recommended scouring with arsenic or other agents which may remove the lesions themselves. I am not convinced this gets to the root cause, however.”

  “What does Maestro Danek suggest?” asked the student-leader.

  “If you attend his seminar tonight, be sure to ask him. In the meantime, you have patients to see.” He clapped his hands twice, and the students separated into little knots moving to this or that bed.

  The door opened again, and the two men returned. They took up their buckets and carried them off between the beds as if nothing had happened. “That girl. He’s given her a death sentence,” Elisha said.

  “Do you not have leprosy in England?” Christina asked.

  “Of course, but I’d like to think the lazars are treated with greater sympathy.”

  The other professor stepped up to them. “Ah, Maestra. Good of you to join us.”

  “It seemed a good class, Antonio.”

  His eyebrows leapt. “Excellent. I paid off the gate to let in the next leper who came to the door. It helps the students to get a close look. They shall be more cautious about diagnosis in the future. It pays to be aware, even in the presence of a pestilence like the one that grows about us, that the usual afflictions are still about. And now, I need a drink.” He waved a hand at Elisha. “Is this the fellow that Lucius is all upset over? He looks well enough to me.”

  “Elisha recently arrived from the court of Empress Margaret.”

  Antonio kept his gaze locked to Christina’s. “He does not approve of how we handle lazars.”

  “In allowing her past the gate, you let her believe she might get treatment,” Elisha pointed out. “Why elevate her hopes like that, just to dash them? You might at least have had her escorted to the lazar house with a little kindness.”

  “She was treated—exactly as she deserved. She is still gadding about the streets as if she had no illness at all, spreading her sin and wantonness. Until she accepts her fate and submits to God’s justice, she shall never find a cure.” Antonio shook his head. “No, I really need that drink.” He patted his robes and found a flask, taking a long swallow. “That’s better. I have to say, you’re not convincing me you should be allowed to stay, much less gain access to something as valuable as our library, not to mention our own store of knowledge.”

  “Very well,” Elisha spread his hands toward the beds on either side. “Assign me a patient.”

  “I had been thinking,” Christina began, but Antonio turned his attention to Elisha.

  “Ward three, bed twelve,” Antonio said. “That way, if nothing comes of it, at least there is no family to care.”

  “Really, Maestro, I intended to bring him on my rounds before—”

  “He wants a patient, I’ve given him one. See you at dinner.” Antonio dipped his head and strolled away, taking another swing from his flask.

  “By dinner he shall be drunk again. An unbecoming excess of fluid that fails to complement his bilious nature.” Christina’s eyes rested on the empty bed.

  “The patient in bed twelve,” Elisha prompted. “What can you tell me about him? her?”

  “Him. Most definitely him.” Her cheeks sagged. “Well, come along then, you can hardly do worse than the rest of us.” They mounted the stairs to the upper story as she spoke. “Bed twelve was brought to us as experiencing demonic possession. He had been through an exorcism at the church, but it only made him more wild. He fights tooth and nail to escape, and some are inclined to allow him to go and fend for himself, or not, as God wills it. From my own brief examination, I can tell you that he is of good family and noble birth—his teeth are present and in good condition, suggesting a diet of well-ground bread. I should guess he is about ten years old. He is tall with limbs well-formed, suggesting that he has not contended with starvation. His features are regular, not unattractive, aside from the scars and markings of some disease. It may be that the scars are evidence of a sickness and recovery which damaged his mind.”

  About ten years old and an orphan. The same had happened to Elisha’s brother, Nathaniel, when their mother died, an uncomfortable echo. At least Nathaniel had Elisha, until Elisha let him down and he took his own life. This boy, apparently, had no one. Elisha pushed away the memories and focused on Christina. “Have you been able to determine the origin of the scars?”

  “Some appear consistent with pox, but he also has areas of rough skin suggesting a more general rash, and his fingers have lumps that imply even leprosy itself, though he shows no sign of active infection, and that has been discounted as an explanation. In another child, I should say that it is the attention of his parents he desires and so the demonic possession was a creative invention to force that attention—except that he was abandoned at the church, and they brought him to us. Whatever family he had has washed their hands of him. Whoever abandoned him left a rather large sum of money that his problems should be dealt with.” She nearly smiled. “You know that the church is at a loss when they are willing to give up such a fortune just to be rid of the problem.” She pushed through a door into a room filled with shrieking. “We had him in one of the private chambers,” she continued, raising her voice to be heard above the cries, “but there are now sufficient patients requiring those chambers that we’ve had to move him up here. The bruises you will see are a result of that transition.”

  The few other beds held patients more still than lively, some holding pillows to their ears, glaring as Christina passed by, but too poor to insist on better accommodations. Ignoring the screams, or perhaps used to the noise, two nuns moved among the patients, distributing bowls of thin soup, sometimes adding a handful of herbs or a dash of something from a bottle.

  And the last bed held a horror scene. A boy stood upside down against the wall, gripping the bedposts with his hands, short ropes binding his wrists just below where he grabbed. Thick black hair hung down around his thin, scarred face. He screamed at the top of his voice, a piercing sound that nearly drove Elisha to ask for a pillow to cover his own ears. Instead, Elisha drew back his senses as they approached, allowing Death to creep through him and lessen his response.

  A third nun stood at the foot of the bed, soup dripping from her face and habit. “You fiend! We are here of God’s mercy—a mercy you don’t deserve—and you foul everything!”

  The boy beat his heels against the wall and screamed all the louder. His eyes squeezed shut with the force of his madness, his face gone red and blotchy.

  “Bleed him again, Maestra,” the nun said, wiping a hand over her face as they approached. “Bleed the devil out of him so at least he can be fed.”

  “Patience, sister. He can’t keep this up, not with his head down like that.” Christina stood beside the nun.

  Blood marked the wall where the boy was kicking, his feet battering the stones as if he could pound his way through, and Elisha could see why some felt they should simply let him go and take his madness with him. Then the feet went still and the body wavered a
moment in the air. He went limp, peeling downward and tumbling to the bed, unconscious. In that moment between madness and silence, Elisha felt the shock of recognition. The boy was a magus, and he was terrified out of his mind.

  Chapter 11

  Christina stared down at the collapsed child. “I’ll send a student to bind his wounds and leave some food he can eat when he revives.”

  “If you tell me where to find the bandages, I’ll tend him,” Elisha said.

  “There’s no need for you to take this on, truly, Doctor.”

  “No, indeed,” the nun offered. “It is my holy penance to serve in this ward for my own stridency, I am sure.” She bustled off to a chest by the wall and returned with a handful of cloth. “My mistake was unbinding his mouth before asking for him to be bled. I should have known better. He had seemed, for the moment, to be calm.”

  Before she could begin the task, Elisha took the bandages from her hand. “Maestro Antonio has appointed me the boy’s physician, and I shall direct his treatment from now on. You said he was calm until you took out the gag?” He sat down on the side of the bed—large enough for three patients, and occupied by only one.

  “Indeed, it seemed the smell of the soup was calming him, and I spoke to him as I was taking the gag. Silvio came up, and I asked him to wait, that perhaps the bleeding wasn’t needed. That’s when the fiend went mad and twisted all about. Such things are common in possessions like this.”

  Silvio, the mancer. “There’s to be no more bleedings. I can’t make a proper diagnosis without full awareness of his symptoms—understood?”

  “I hardly think a demonic possession can be mistaken for some other ailment. What the boy needs is a priest.”

  “Nevertheless, that’s up to me now.” He met the nun’s eye until she looked away.

  The boy’s leg twitched from Elisha as he reached out, and he projected peace and comfort, letting his hand go warm. He remembered Father Uccello on the rack, asking not to be touched, telling him that it was the power of the captors to touch their victim where they would, when they would, how they would. Elisha drew back his hand. He leaned in close.

  The skin of the boy’s heels was thick and slightly cracked in a few places by his violence so that blood oozed through. Elisha had been about the same age when he saw Brigit’s mother burned. Her transformation into an angel had transformed him as well, but his parents wouldn’t believe what happened to him, that an angel had stroked his cheek with her outstretched wing as she died upon the stake. Nor would he refrain from insisting it was the truth. Convinced he was touched by the devil, his mother thought to send him to a monastery, and the priest who was to bring him there had bound and gagged him, so that none need hear his madness. Twenty years ago, Elisha had been helpless at the hands of others. Far too often since then, Elisha found himself helpless yet again. This night, Elisha held the power. He had entered the room, thinking of his brother, and instead confronted himself. So many echoes of the past layered the moment as if his own scars overlaid those of his patient.

  “I’d rather let him rest a while than risk upsetting him again so soon by firm handling.” He set down the bandages the nun had given him and moved toward the boy’s head, framed by his bound arms. The straps at his wrists were crossed, evidence of his wild attempt to escape, and Elisha imagined him flailing away from the foot of the bed, twisting himself around, finishing with his back to the wall, even at such an extraordinary angle. Did he feel safer that way, with his back to the wall? Was it only Silvio whose presence disturbed him so much? But that wouldn’t explain his behavior before he arrived at the medical school. Still, his wild flailing had left him on his face. Encouraging rest, withdrawing his presence to a bare minimum of contact, Elisha lifted the boy and gently turned him, lying him on his back, his ragged tunic drawn down toward his bare knees. He wanted to simply throw off the boy’s bindings, but with no sense of what was wrong with him, that might only place him at greater risk. As Christina had observed, disease and treatment marked every inch of his flesh—the pock-marks of hives, the rough patches of old lesions, the bruises of his confinement and his battle against it, the thin scars of multiple bleedings, the thicker marks where growths had been removed or scraped. He might have been a handsome, well-formed child but for the ravages of disease and doctors.

  “At rest like that, he appears almost ordinary,” Christina remarked.

  “Only because he’s exhausted himself. The devil can only do so much with such a weak vessel,” the nun replied. “Even in the night he thrashes about. If he’s not gagged, he howls then, too.”

  Elisha watched the boy’s breathing grow steady, extending his senses to track the boy’s racing heart as it calmed in his collapse. “What is he so afraid of?”

  “Afraid? It’s we who are afraid of him, and well we should be. What if the devil should make the leap? If someone else, someone vulnerable should come by and the devil departs from this child into another.” The nun patted the cross at her breast. “I’ve got the Lord to protect me, of course, but not everyone can be so blessed.”

  A bell began to toll outside. “We’re expected at dinner,” Christina remarked.

  “Are you the night nurse?” Elisha asked the nun, as he rose from the bed.

  “I am.”

  “I’ve been given the corner chamber on the first floor of the student dormitory—come and wake me when his nightmares begin.”

  “Very well,” she said, but her face suggested that he was as mad as the child he had just been assigned to heal.

  “You are a man of great compassion,” Christina said as they descended the opposite stairs into the rush of students heading off for meals and visiting family members heading for home.

  “It is my deepest flaw, Maestra.” His mind had not yet left the child, the boy who knew a mancer when he saw one.

  “An interesting diagnosis.”

  “Will Maestro Danek be joining us?” He would like the chance to ask his fellow magus about his patient. He did not yet know if Danek were sensitive enough to be aware the child was a magus without touching him, but if the teacher monitored this campus at all, he likely had figured that out by now.

  Shaking her head, Christina said, “He works all hours, staying down in the specimen room preparing medical simples much of the day, then checking his patients at night. Even his students must go downstairs to see him or attend his seminar. He is not a popular assignment as his interests are in the area of infectious disease, the sort most commonly spread among the poor and depraved, hardly the sort of thing our wealthy patrons are likely to contract. Given the current pestilence, however, more people have been paying attention to his classes. That’s why the papal physician has come here, but I’m afraid he’s found little of use.”

  A door stood open into a brightly lit space and a servant bowed them into a chamber small but sumptuously dressed with richly carved and painted beams and tapestries on the walls between glass-paned windows. A fire danced in the broad hearth, illuminating the men who gathered before them—all men, aside from Christina and a few serving girls. Antonio stood, a goblet in hand, speaking with a well-dressed student while Lucius huddled with his two acolytes, including the library keeper. A portly man in professorial robes occupied a head chair. That must be Maestro Teodor, the school’s director. He engaged in avid conversation with another man at his right, a fellow with pale hair cut a bit short.

  “At last, we can eat!” Antonio declared, dropping into a chair held out for him by a servant.

  “It seemed fitting I should meet my new patient before dining, Maestro,” Elisha said.

  “Whereas I do not believe you are fit to dine with us at all.” Lucius strode to the table and rapped it with his fist. “I have so many of you as can be gathered, and so I say to you that this man is no better than a barber. Worse, in fact, for he is traitor to the king of England, and a practitioner of the dark arts.”<
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  The director steepled his hands on the table before him. “My dear Lucius. Guy has only two more nights among us—his departure is too long delayed already—and I would rather not spoil the occasion with this dispute. Please, let us be seated. Day after tomorrow, we can speak of all of this, after Guy’s ship has safely left harbor, and the rest of us have had the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with the situation.”

  “I do appreciate your consideration, Teodor,” said his conversational companion, “but I don’t wish my own brief stay to disrupt the school any more than is necessary.” He spoke with a French accent, standing out among the Italians. That must be Guy de Chauliac, the papal physician.

  “You see, Maestro Teodor, even Guy recognizes the urgency of this situation. Whereas you do not comprehend the insidious danger of having such a person in our midst! Already he is interfering with treatments ordered by other, more qualified practitioners.”

  “So let him try.” Antonio waved his hand, the fingers still wiggling as he spoke. “He can hardly do worse than some of our students.” His nose looked red, his eyes blurry.

  Christina said, “Elisha has laid allegations of his own, Teodor, regarding the fate of our former student, Benedict de Fleur, who departed here as an assistant to Maestro Lucius and never returned.”

  “He entered his own practice in England,” Lucius insisted. “As one would hope for all of one’s assistants—at least, those who do not prefer to teach.”

  The library keeper gave the slightest bow.

  “You accuse me of being a traitor to the crown of England?” Elisha felt under his tunic for the letters, now worn with travel, sweat and blood, that Thomas had given him when he set sail. His hand trembled, the mere presence of his old adversary setting him on edge. “I have here a royal writ, granted for my safe passage by Thomas, by Grace of God, the King of England.” He displayed the document, its royal seal dangling for all to see. “Do you wish to examine it?” Elisha held it out to Teodor, the portly man at the head of the table.